Recognized as one of the oldest, most rigorous, and most influential evaluation systems in higher education, the Ranking from Shanghai, officially known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), has been updated annually since its launch in 2003. In this year’s edition, it analyzed more than 2,500 institutions of higher education worldwide to select and publish only the top 1,000.
The methodology of this CWUR ranking is based on six indicators of academic and scientific performance: the number of alumni and faculty members who have been awarded the Nobel Prize and the Fields Medal, the number of researchers who are highly cited in their respective fields, and the number of articles published in prestigious scientific journals Nature and Science, the number of publications indexed in the databases Science Citation Index-Expanded and Social Science Citation Index, as well as academic performance per capita of the institution relative to its size.
The top spot in the world rankings belongs, once again, to Harvard University (U.S.), which ranks first for the 23rd consecutive year, followed by Stanford University (U.S.), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.), University of Cambridge(United Kingdom) and University of California, Berkeley (U.S.).
